Lindon gave a muffled snort, his mouth curling upward. “Years ago, Janet – er – Lock,” he said with a sardonic eye roll, “caught me trying to steal pharma that she had her eye on. We’d picked the same depot to raid. She almost blew my head off. No joke. Been together ever since.” He smiled. “I help her out, she helps me get meds for my family who live here.”
“Your family lives here?”
“Not blood, but we’re all family in this place,” he answered, massaging the stress out of his long fingers. “When I joined on with her, I thought maybe someday we would be able to break this system. I had just come to terms with the fact that it wasn’t going to happen. And then you came along.”
“What are we doing here?”
“Lock’s calling in a favor,” said Lindon. He gestured to the display as the woman came into view, emerging from a tunnel of trees. “Here she is now.”
Lock, goggles down, knocked on Llydia’s window. “Open up, no drones overhead,” her voice came muffled through the glass. “I think you all made it without a tail.”
Willa triggered the door and they stepped out. The air was greenhouse wet and sweet like wisteria. Warmer too. It felt like spring, not autumn.
Lock wheeled and began toward the building sprawled out before them. “Lindon acquaint you with your whereabouts?”
“He did,” Willa answered. Her eyes drank in the alien landscape. The old parking lot opposite the modular homes stretched to the northwest until the trees obscured its full reach. Small swatches of a concrete wall showed through the gaps between trunks. The prefabricated homes were a color that had once been white, with solid plastic steps leading up to a single thin door at the center of each. Flanking the doors to either side were squat, horizontal windows. Willa thought they looked like faces; screaming mouths between suspicious eyes. The houses in the blood districts, while small and mostly decrepit, had been, at least at some point, homes.
“Apparently the factory modules were never supposed to be lived in long term – that was what people were originally told anyways,” said Lindon, sweeping his hand to the expanse. “But I guess it was good enough for Patriot, so…”
“Easier to get people to go somewhere if you tell ’em it’s temporary,” said Lock, kicking a crabapple.
“Wasn’t it obvious when it happened?” Willa said. “Mass relocation? How many times throughout history have we seen this play out?”
“Zero times if you don’t know your history,” said Lock, wagging a finger. “Edit the history books. Keep the populace ignorant. By the time you figure out what’s happened to you, you’re living behind a fence. Oops.”
Willa saw how it all must have unfolded, with years passing before the intent of the settlement became fully clear, especially to those who remained outside its walls. For decades, Patriot had touted its “convalescence centers,” where the sick were supposedly treated, and Willa loathed herself for ever believing them. Over decades, the company had gradually sacked away an entire segment of the population under the theory that any pathogens would eradicate with the deaths of their hosts. Of course, diseases were nomadic things and naturally cropped up in the districts, so Bad Blood always had an influx.
“I mean, Patriot pretty much telegraphed what they were doing,” Lock went on. “How’s it go? Sequestration, diagnosis, inoculation, elimination? Just move that S to the back and you get ‘DIES’. I mean, come on, folks, they literally spelled out their intent.”
Looking around, though, the reality of Bad Blood didn’t quite match Willa’s conception of what such a place would be.
Small touches here and there showed how each module had been tailored by its occupants: makeshift awnings, vine covered trellises, washbasins, even flowerboxes with living flowers. In some places the units had been pushed together, connected in twos, threes, and fours, horseshoed around open areas that embraced communal spaces. Further back, Willa spotted a number of vintage drone shells overturned as water collectors with distribution pipes spreading out toward the clusters of homes. She traced one of them to a quadrangle of gardens, in one corner overflowing with branches hanging heavy with pomegranates. Overhead, vine-covered cables towing pirated electricity ran to the modules, illuminating their windows with illegal light. Willa noted with a touch of cheer that Bad Blood seemed no worse off for its lack of contact with the outside world.
All around, shades tugged to the sides and doors cracked open. Parents and children, entire families intact, emerged, cheeks and bellies full. They stood confident but also protective, not just of their families but of their home – this settlement where they had been sent to disappear, now their sanctuary within a dying city. Seeming almost at ease, they lacked the drawn angst and blank despondency of their corollaries in the districts. These people had built something where there was nothing. They had been forsaken and were better for it.
“Now you see the source of my secret cache,” Lock said, finger flicking toward one of the small gardens. “Only place to get quality produce.”
And there Willa had the answer to Lock’s mysterious bowls of fresh fruit.
“They’re pretty self-sufficient here, as you can see, but if I can do a little hocus pocus on a pharma drone or dial up some direct current for them, skim some electrons, then I get to forage.”
The watchers looked from the steps and patios surrounding their modules. Willa followed Lock around to the side of the big building and they arrived at a heavy steel door with an analog knob and deadbolt. Lock knocked and after a few seconds it pulled open from within. A man with a lazy blue eye pinched his face into the crack of the door. “Hey Janet,” he said. “Password?”
“You ask for the password before you open the door, John,” said Lock, pushing it wide and breezing by with the others in tow.
“Oh,” he mumbled, shutting the door and bolting it. “I still need to know the password though.”
“Vengeance!” hollered Lock without looking back.
Heading in, Willa felt a rush of nostalgia. She’d shopped at stores just like it during her formative years. They sold groceries in the front half and everything from housewares to clothing and garden supplies in the back half. The concept of “stores” at all, much less one of this scope and selection, was surreal now. The idea that someone could go to one place, buy a gallon of cold milk, a bag of apples, school clothes, and a vacuum cleaner, bordered on obscene. To think that not only had such luxury existed, but that people had taken it for granted, was the peak of absurdity.
It hadn’t really lasted, in the grand scheme of things. The megastores arrived and strangled out the small shops, then the internet wiped out the megastores, and then Patriot killed everything. If you wanted something now, you bartered, took your chances on the black market, or hit the local Patriot sundry shop. They already had your blood, why not also the money they’d paid you for it? Full circle.
Willa followed Lock past dozens of dusty checkout aisles. All of the old fluorescents were burnt out or broken with the exception of a small grid of lights in the far corner near the refrigerated section. “Is this where the truck is?” asked Willa.
“It’s where the truck isn’t,” answered Lock, sending a shopping cart rattling to the side. “It’s been parted out so Bad Blood can use its bits. Our price of admission.”
The contents of the shelves, and in most places the shelves themselves, were long gone, as anything useful had been stripped and repurposed within the settlement. As they neared the back section, the unmistakable hum of refrigeration compressors vibrated lightly through the air.
John came up alongside Willa. He was short and stocky with haystack blond hair, and had on a tucked-in flannel shirt, making him look like a diminutive lumberjack. “Welcome to the Market,” he said.
They rounded the corner and Willa saw it. An entire aisle, stacked front to back with shining glass panes in gleaming metal doors. Like picture frames, they amplified the wet emerald skin of bell peppers, flaming orange carrots, a rainbow of berri
es, and every type of mushroom you could name. Further down were the season’s last tomatoes, obese squashes, and herbs like rosemary and parsley. Pumpkins! Opposite the kaleidoscope of produce were shelves upon shelves of bread. Some low and dense, others high and fluffy, wrapped lovingly in waxy parchment. Toward the middle of the lane, people restocked meats. Before Willa could ask, Lock interjected, “Chicken, rabbit, cat.”
“Squirrel,” Lindon added, licking his lips.
“They share all of this,” said Lock. She opened a door and pointed at a cucumber, raised her eyebrows at John.
“Go ahead,” he said.
Lock took up the vegetable and crunched into it like it’d already been pickled. She gestured to a spot near the end of the aisle. “All the way down,” she crunched, “that’s us.”
Light from the refrigerators filtered red onto the concrete floor. Rows upon rows of Ichorwulf food, neatly strung in its poly bags, intact and chilled. Willa walked down the aisle and opened a door, letting a cloud creep across it. Here and there, she flipped up the bags to check their labels, and did so down the row. Shutting the final door with a frosty thump, she turned to Lock and Lindon. “The distribution is perfect. O-neg at around seven percent, O-pos at just under forty, A-neg at looks like five or so,” she said.
John scooted up and presented a tally jotted on the back of an old coupon book. “AB-pos is high though, almost ten percent. I don’t know why they have so much. Should be three, right Willa?”
“Yeah, that’s right. It should be three, but it’s not too important. We got all the highblood,” she said. “How many did we get? It’s got to be thousands.”
“Just over thirty-thousand units of highblood,” Lock answered, letting the number hang in the air. “And I only need a fifth of a bag for the decoy pocket.”
Willa felt an overwhelming rush. “With that we can make a hundred fifty–”
“A hundred and fifty thousand fakes, depending on time,” Lock interjected. “We’ll do it here. Assembly line style. We’ll build the bags, put in the decoy blood and then distribute for the lowbloods to top off with their own juice.”
“You think Patriot won’t come for their truck?” Willa asked.
“Truck ain’t throwing out a signal anymore, and even if they thought it was here? No way. Its cargo would be deemed tainted. Motherfuckers are scared of disease. They only fly out here to ditch the infirm.” She looked at John. “No offense.”
“None taken,” he said.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
HYPOTENSION
Low blood pressure.
Using his own saliva as a gentle solvent for the flaky residue of what little blood remained, he’d nearly sucked the tablecloth clean. He swallowed his spit in savored sips as he journeyed from AB Plus into A Minus, the cloth like a baby’s blanket at his lips. It had been just enough of a boost to get him upright and out of the house, which was where he was supposed to be. Didn’t matter though what he was supposed to be doing, the compulsion to get free of the place wasn’t one a person could fight. Had he even tried to fight it? Had he wanted to? He couldn’t say to what the impulse was owed; a command from his own mind, maybe. Thoughts came and went, blinking on and off like fireflies. Some he recognized, others he didn’t. And while the remnant red had given him some strength, his brain – his entire sense of who he was, really – felt like it was crumbling.
Shit had gone bad, he knew that. He was hurting. Not in a way he’d ever hurt before – not like being cut or punched or sick even. His belly felt alive, like his organs were rearranging themselves. Among the fireflies, one thought kept crisscrossing in his mind. He looked down at the teeth marks on his arm, faded now and nearly all healed. The one he’d pummeled had played dirty and bit him, but he damn sure hadn’t seen any golden fangs – as far as he knew, he’d been awake throughout the entire thing, at least up until they got him with that lacer. He ran his fingertips over the skin of his neck and, aside from the wound that the redhead had sewn up, felt no holes, not even scabs. How could he be changing without a proper, bloodsucking bite? The only time he’d faded out was after they’d quit the place with the kids.
The kids. How’d he let them take the kids? They’d cheated, no doubt, involving guns and the element of surprise. A rematch would be in order if he got right and managed to find the sonsabitches. He had been a damned-to-Hell evil scrapper as a kid. The skinniest of the bunch, he’d learned to fight furiously, to play dirty if it came to it – and especially when it didn’t. Back at Seychelles, he knew he’d gotten a few punches in, bloodied the one bastard’s face into ground beef with his big old knuckles, which felt grand. He’d grown up knowing he could talk his way out of a confrontation, but his hands were weapons and he’d usually felt like using ’em. They were bigger than hands were supposed to be. Some thought it was a gift, that was a fact. The old boys who ran the boxing gym when he was just a sprout used to holler at him from the steps to get in the ring, offering to train him and his heavy hands. He never did take them up; he didn’t want to be constrained. He was too busy with all manner of mischief and criminal activity to conduct. Turned out he wasn’t the best criminal, though, with half his adult years spent in the slammer. But it did mean more time for fighting.
Where was he again?
He considered his knuckles for a beat, wondered if he still had the knockout power of his formative years.
The headache was getting worse, and with it came odd shifts in perception like he’d taken a hallucinogen, inducing paranoia and quickening his temper, like with the lowland fungi he and his crew had once stuffed into their faces as teenagers so they could travel the astral plane.
The new girl had caught on to his delirium and he’d bolted from the house before her questions could set him off. It wasn’t anything really about her prying, per se, but more so the fact that she was on to his altered state, his fevered distraction.
As he stumble-shuffled ahead, he reflected on leaving like he did. Those children there, the ones the girl watched over now, they were his charges and had been for most of their lives. He’d cared for many of them when their parents gave out from the Trade. There was a time when he would have threatened to kill anyone who so much as suggested they take over for him, even just to lend a hand or give him a breather. Kill. Kill with those heavy hands. Because he’d been given responsibility for them, and he would be their source of stability and their provider, their educator and their guardian. But that guy was a ghost now, wasn’t he? Just a haunt in that house somewhere, looming, feeling sorrowful and jealous. The man walking through A Minus in the other man’s clothes was someone else, and he didn’t see those kids the same way. His heart felt brittle and he thought that should make him sad, but it didn’t. Maybe he could find a stranger and recount the story so that they might weep in his stead.
He shook his head and sucked on the last faint patch of scarlet, ditched the tablecloth. He looked around to find himself stopped in the center of the street. There was no way he’d have the strength to make it. He’d go snakeshit with starvation before he’d get far enough to launder the money that jingled like Christmas in his pocket.
His eyelids pushed their way down over his prickling eyeballs. He gazed longingly at the ground. Lie down in that yellow grass and be asleep in five seconds. Maybe death would come. He didn’t think of it as suicide, just… being done. You tell the Good Lord thanks for the chance even though it didn’t go as either of you thought.
The ground did beckon, but his brain said no. The long nap is coming, just not yet.
He set the thought aside for the moment and turned back the way he’d come. His brain was too cramped and energy-starved to think any more about the why of the hunger. An urge came to change direction, and so he did. Ignorant of his destination, he felt compelled by a curious sense of adventure. Where was he taking himself?
It must have been twenty blocks before he finally stopped walking. He didn’t make a decision to stop, he just did. Even through the haze of
his new perception, he recognized the neighborhood. Southwest corner of A Minus, two blocks from Donor Three. It was surrounded by people. Angry people. Right. Right. They were protestors. What were they doing? Protesting something. But what? It was like someone had boxed up his memories for relocation. His vision blurred. Squinting, he watched. There was something he was supposed to be looking for. Or was there? Was he meeting someone? Police drones hovered. Five-O. One or two were parked with officers standing at the crowd’s perimeter.
On the opposite side of the street, a man and a woman headed down the block toward the crowd, looking clean. Their clothes weren’t too old, might have even been newish. Not a single moth-hole or stain. Oh, and that hair! Shiny. Fluffy. They were O-negs if they were anything.
And they weren’t protesters either. No sir. They were braving the crowd to get that money. Look at them. Just full of blood. Bursting. The thought had him slavering like a junky and he speed-walked after them, elbows pumping. As they reached the line of protesters, he grabbed for the man’s arm, who pulled it quickly away.
“What do you think you’re–”
“Don’t want to hurt you, just listen.”
“Excuse us!” said the man, pushing his lady friend ahead.
“Hear me out!” he barked, holding up a tricoin worth twenty-five thousand.
“Is that real?” asked the woman, suddenly entranced, her voice gone greedy.
“You know it is. Take it. Feel it.”
She did, weighed it in her palm. Her eyes glistened as she exchanged a look with her partner, handed it to him. He did the same. “Is this a trick?”
“Nah. No trick.”
“What do you want then? We don’t have anything worth this much.”
“Hell you don’t,” he said. “But you can’t give it over out here.” He guided them to a gravel pathway between narrow buildings, one a boarded-up drycleaners, and the other a small Patriot commissary. “Look at me. I ain’t gonna hurt you. Come on.”
The Phlebotomist Page 22
